Perfect Tunes - Emily Gould Page 0,79

would take at least thirty-five minutes to get there. There both was and wasn’t still time to make today’s endeavor worthwhile.

She’d wanted to book a session in the same recording studio where she’d visited Dylan fifteen years earlier, but that building and everything else on its block in Bushwick had been demolished, it turned out; on Google Earth, she saw the glass-and-steel condo lump that had risen in its place. It was too bad because she had been counting on memories of the heightened, desperate feeling she’d had in that room to help her get into the right mind-set to produce a song. She needed access to that fever pitch; she had never managed to create anything without it, except for the nonsense jingles she’d made up for the baby classes out of loopy sleep-starved desperation.

Though, thinking about it more, she had wanted badly to write real songs during that part of her life. She remembered spending time with toddler Marie—those endless hours before a morning nap, or the similarly infinite spans in the late afternoon before bedtime—and feeling the stifled urge to release a song that was thrumming inside her, keeping her alert as she picked up and restacked blocks or reread a book about animal noises for the fourth consecutive time. Of course, if she’d been presented with a spare day in a recording studio in any of those moments, she’d likely have flailed around not knowing what to do with it, just like she was doing right now.

“I’m just going to play an old song to warm up,” she told the engineer, who nodded at her wordlessly. He was probably counting down the minutes, too, looking forward to getting a sandwich or something, or to greeting whoever had booked the day’s next session, someone who would likely be competent, or at least play music.

Fuck! She had to get it together and transmute the self-hatred and impotence she felt into something resembling creativity. She played the opening of her old song about Dylan, the plaintive one about wondering whether someone was your boyfriend, and without thinking too hard, began to make up new words to it, nonsense words at first. She sang angrily, loudly, the way she’d sung in the shower as a teenager, when she’d mistakenly thought that the noise of the water drowned her voice out. Gradually the song became a new song, though it had something in common with the old one. She repeated a chorus over and over again, some nonsense about someone not loving you the way you loved them.

She couldn’t get any further than that. Still, it was something. She tried it again in a different key, and spent some time thinking about an arrangement with other instruments. At the end of her session, she sent a file of the song to Callie in an email titled “possible song in progress?” and then felt grateful that the rest of her day would keep her busy enough that she wouldn’t be able to check email again for hours, waiting for Callie’s response.

* * *

It occurred to Marie, as her bus pulled up out of the ugly warren of tunnels under Port Authority and began to make its lumbering way out of the city, that she had never left New York on her own before. She hadn’t realized how easy it would be to just buy a ticket, wait in line, and escape. She would be in another city in just a few hours, a place she’d never even visited before. No one had stopped her to ask where her parents were. No one had even looked at her twice, or asked her for ID. She had the backpack she’d left home with that morning, full of useless schoolbooks. She wished she’d thought to pack a change of clothes, but she had her phone and charger and her ATM card. She could wear her underwear inside out tomorrow. She was filled with the sense of power and well-being that comes from deciding to do something on a whim and actually having the nerve to follow through.

The bus ride passed quickly, the blur of 1-95 interrupted only by a bad chicken sandwich at a rest stop in Connecticut. She had a window seat, and the bus didn’t smell overwhelmingly of piss and disinfectant. The girl sitting next to her cleared her throat with an ominous crackling gargle every so often and blew her nose a lot, but she was at least apologetic about it, and